Cinnamon Ass

OP - rose (ANNA) - chick-rock, unexciting animation but it suits the show (too much of Nana K in the snow, though).

ED - a little pain (OLIVIA) - angst-tastic rock ballad, but it’s a pretty good song. Animation is pretty cool, some weird text stuff and all that jazz.

Nana Komatsu is heading to Tokyo to meet up with her boyfriend, Shoji, after he successfully gets into university. Nana Ohsaki wants to make it as a musician in the capital. The two meet by chance on the train, and a standstill due to snow means the two spend plenty of time sat next to each other; despite being seeming opposites in personality, they seem to hit it off, although they quickly part when they reach Tokyo. Nana K spends the night with Shoji, but he quickly wants her out and with a job; she ends up picking an apartment since it’s number 777 and costs 70,000 yen in rent (”nana” means “seven”, so it’s pretty much her lucky number), only to get there and find that the other Nana is looking round the apartment. After a fight over who gets the apartment, Nana K’s estate agent suggests a compromise - it’s big enough for both, so they can share, which of course they agree on. And thus a series was born.

I watched the live-action Nana film about a week or two ago and enjoyed it quite a lot; it’s a decent enough sappy shoujo drama and it worked well in live-action. Compared to the anime, the live-action film is like Plan 9 From Outer Space - the first episode of the anime is brilliant! The excesses that anime allows brings so much more life to the material; both Nanas have buckets more personality and are a lot more fun to watch on screen, and there’s far more comedy in the material than I’d realised whilst still retaining emotional depth.

If you haven’t watched the live-action film or read the manga you’ll probably have no idea what I mean. Suffice to say, Nana looks to be a rather good show if it can keep up the quality of this episode the whole way through; animation is the usual Madhouse solid quality (except this time they’ve captured the atmosphere of the story properly *cough*ParaKiss*cough*) and Paku Romi actually gets to play a female character for once (even if she does sound the same as always…)

I was a bit skeptical going in; the OP’s not that great, and I’d already pegged Ouran for being my one big shoujo fix for the season, but they’re entirely different kettles of fish and Nana totally gew on me as the episode progressed; I even laughed out loud a couple of times!

Watch Nana! I know I will next week!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Nana. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.